New perspective

[JohnnyW]

I've been playing video games for 25 years now. It's part of who I am, sad or not. Recently I just had the idea that maybe I'm not normal in this regard: there are probably a lot more people with less than 5 years of game playing beneath their belts. That got me thinking about what differences we would want in our games.

Being a grizzled veteran of many genres I demand a lot from most games I play. I appreciate games for what they try to be (simple time-wasters like minesweeper for example), but I do expect a very high quality from any game I intend to play with regularity.

When it comes to strategy games I've played quite a few, even board games. Games like Blokus, Axis and Allies, chess, these are examples of games that I've played and achieved some level of mastery. When it comes to video games there is the potential for so much more strategic depth because of the medium. Unless a game provides some insane depth I generally won't feel like the game is a very good puzzle for me to solve - and if the game is not a good puzzle then there should be another reason for me to play the game (for example: immersion), but then is its true purpose to be a strategy game? Grizzled vets like me probably also want complex depth for them to sink their teeth into and learn something new every time they play. But having so much depth could easily be intimidating for people with less gaming experience.


So what is this rant trying to say? Maybe we grizzled vets need to accept that we just aren't who games will be made for anymore. It's not that the games are changing, we have. We demand more and more from video games, perhaps to an unreasonable level?

I'm not saying this with certainty - I just had this idea today and haven't thought it through a bunch (just woke up). It kinda made me sad on a few levels. Also, this doesn't make me like civ5 any more, it just explains to me why I don't like it as much as I hoped. Anyway, please discuss if you like. Don't flame though; this is just a hazy idea I had and wanted to share for your opinions. If I'm speaking gibberish then just ignore me.

 

[Fistalis]

Maybe we grizzled vets need to accept that we just aren't who games will be made for anymore. It's not that the games are changing, we have..

This pretty much sums it up. To make increase profit and make a return on a major game they feel they have to target a more mainstream audience.

The fallacy in this.. is that publishers ignore the demographics of video game players.
The average game player is 34 years old and has been playing games for 12 years.
The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old
source
If you take that as fact.. then we ARE the mainstream video game audience.Yet they seem to think that targeting games to a less experienced gamer demographic is the way to go. I don't get the logic behind it when looking at the demographics of gamers.. but your statement is right on target.

Maybe it simply comes down to the additional dev time it would take to please us vs profits. Why would they spend more money developing something when they can send it out with half the dev time/ features and still make huge profits?

They wouldn't, and this is the issue i think more than anything. Video games have finally crossed the same threshold movies once did.. from a love of passion to a race to create the next blockbuster.
Its no longer about making the best game.. its about creating the next BIG game. We are just now starting to see in gaming what is has been the norm in movies.. bloated, big-budget spectacles that are horrendous in hindsight but are hyped up enough that they make huge gobs of money.

Or maybe we're the rarity.. and the average gamer is all about graphics and the gameplay content is just an excuse to show them off... like the average action movie fan is all about the explosions, and the story line is simply a method to tie the explosions together.

Either way its a trend that won't change until the formula for profiting in the industry changes.

 

[lschnarch]

Maybe we grizzled vets need to accept that we just aren't who games will be made for anymore. It's not that the games are changing, we have. We demand more and more from video games, perhaps to an unreasonable level?

I cannot agree with the last sentence.
We are demanding more and more from our cars, mobiles, friges and tv-sets, too. And guess what? The manufacturers deliver.

But while we as customers have developed, have made experiences, have learned what we like and what not, have learned what works in a game and what doesn't, this particular industry hasn't done so.
And they don't have the need to learn. At least not currently.
Most games are still bought by male adolescents or young adults, who will easily hop from one sensation to the other.

Regarding Civ5, the epic fail was to call this game a "Civilization" game. Over the years, Civ games had evolved to a certain standard. Lowering the quality of your products has rarely proven to be a good idea.

The game wouldn't have been any better if it would have got a different name, but the expectations based on the previous iterations wouldn't have been there.
But they wanted to milk the brand name. And that was a business decision, not the fault of the customers.

 

[Fistalis]

Most games are still bought by male adolescents or young adults, who will easily hop from one sensation to the other.

Hmm every study i've seen points to the average gamer being in his early to mid 30s.. the "nintendo generation" if you will.
Source

I think the demographic you suggest is a plain old stereotype.

 

[MkLh]

So what is this rant trying to say? Maybe we grizzled vets need to accept that we just aren't who games will be made for anymore. It's not that the games are changing, we have. We demand more and more from video games, perhaps to an unreasonable level?

While it's probably true that it will be harder to get excited about new things as you get older, I don't think that explains well the fact that many who liked and still like Civ4 dislike Civ5.

 

[JohnnyW]

This pretty much sums it up. To make increase profit and make a return on a major game they feel they have to target a more mainstream audience.

The fallacy in this.. is that publishers ignore the demographics of video game players.
The average game player is 34 years old and has been playing games for 12 years.
The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old
source
If you take that as fact.. then we ARE the mainstream video game audience.Yet they seem to think that targeting games to a less experienced gamer demographic is the way to go. I don't get the logic behind it when looking at the demographics of gamers.. but your statement is right on target.

I think some of it has to do with drawing in a new generation. I'm assuming at some point I'll grow up and play video games less than I do now. If that's the case then the market will need to draw in those new customers with the types of games that originally drew us in: Super Mario Brothers, Sonic, Dragon Warrior, Sim City, etc. The gaming market will always need simple games to refresh its consumer base with new gamers.

Man do I miss early 90's video gaming though.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Mass appeal games have always had vastly larger audiences than typical computer games in general, and strategy games are an even smaller subset. They see 60 million + FarmVille players, or hundreds of millions of FreeCell players, and see money money money. The problem, of course, is that those people are interested in very different types of games; a game like Civ 1-5 is by design too difficult, complex, and long to interest them.

However, Sid will probably water it down enough to make a very profitable Facebook game that earns mountains of coin. I could see a diluted Civ where they sell in-game items for cash as being quick, super-easy, and lending itself to repetitive tasks. In fact, I'd bet on it. I wouldn't bet so much on Civ 6, truth be told, since you please no one by going halfway between Minesweeper and Civ 4.

 

[Clement]

I feel the main problem today is that instant accessiblity is too often placed above depth in order of importance when making a game, The developers desire that we should just be able to pick up and play these games without investing any time or effort into finding out what makes them tick is seriously affecting their overall quality.

 

[joyous_gard]

Yeah, I am an adult gamer. I started playing games on 2600 as a kid, moved to NES, ended up on computer games.

I don't like how skeezy video game environment is. I'd much rather it move into the realm of other entertainment such as sports, television, movies. All those industries have reputable journalists and news outlets. They have crossover with other entertainment sectors. It's a good place to be and video games are mature now, they need to move into more mature sector.

My opinion of video game industry is sleeze. Gamers are portrayed to be hackers and thieves. 3rd party vendors are normal.

It's always important to know your market. Civ is 30 years old. So some of its market is 30 years older. Some of the market is 15 years older. Some of the market is new. They need to have a target. It doesn't make sense to dump a market to get a new market. That would be counter-productive and less lucrative (I think).

I think most of this Civ V problem falls on the designer of the game. The more I think about it the more I see its problems with the designer. He was a modder, not a video game designer. He modified existing games. A decent game with a decent working system had to be present in order for him to modify it. At my work, we give interns existing SAS programs and ask them to modify it to make more attractive output or something. We don't ask them to write new summary programs. 2K/Sid/whoever may have just wanted to get one more game out but didn't want to spend the money on a designer so they took a look around and used what they had. I don't even know if they looked at target markets or planned things out. It might have just been there was one person willing to do the job and so they went with it and figured "it will get by on name recognition and who knows maybe we will get a top notch game."

To follow Civ IV BTS may have been intimidating to established video game designers. It is very much a pinnacle with a fanatic base. At least it is currently the pinnacle, who knows what the future will hold.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Fairly easy... it's all about targeting specific markets or not.
They design, develop, distribute by evaluating sales potential beforehand.
Add the risk of competing products, the usual demographic variations and the whole commercial principles to the mix and what you get is Offer/Demand ratios.

Civilization games have a share (a slot if you like) of *ANY* possible market(s) as soon as the boxsets hit the shelves. I'd agree that the title names & reputation do precede any form of success or failure but in the long run, if they don't get *TO* the (most) consumers, they'll fail to recuperate their investment or register any kind of reasonable profits.
Business as usual. Capitalism. Corporation X versus Y & Z.

When taken into such a context, we don't really need any new perspective on our games - all we get is the inevitable Time loop effect. PCs are just becoming the Home-Grown Arcades of the 80's i got somehow used to (I'm 55!) and when i switch the TeeVee on, it's Plasma-LCD full-panoramic 16-9 high-definition wide & wild entertainment.
Dumping quarters onto MsPacman for months gets to the head, given.
All else is plain straight fun or not.

 

[Nares]

I'm assuming at some point I'll grow up and play video games less than I do now.

Playing less isn't the developers' concern; it's how much you're willing to spend.

Adult gamers have proven themselves completely incapable of keeping their wallets closed to DLC expenditures. Every such game I've come across is filled will all types of adult gamers who have the disposable income to blow on the most trivial of things.

Look at this game. You see all these gamers who hate Steam, but still spend ridiculous amounts of money buying all types of games because they're a) on sale, and b) immediately available. It's ridiculous.

 

[sharkles]

The general trend in video games is that they have only grown more complicated over time. We started with Pong, after all.
You also seem to be working with the assumption that new gamers can't or won't appreciate a game with "insane depth."
Whatever that is.

(corrected to "new gamers" - it's what I meant as well)

 

[JohnnyW]

Look at this game. You see all these gamers who hate Steam, but still spend ridiculous amounts of money buying all types of games because they're a) on sale, and b) immediately available. It's ridiculous.

I don't hate steam personally, I love it. I got EU3+HTTT for $6. Never woulda tried it without steam.

You also seem to be working with the assumption that young gamers can't or won't appreciate a game with "insane depth."
Whatever that is.

EU3 is a good example of "insane depth." And it's not that young gamers can't appreciate depth (I'm talking about new gamers anyway, not young ones [when I was 14 I had already been playing video games for 10 years for example]), it's that the more experience you have with video games the more likely it is you'll appreciate - and expect - more depth from them.

 

[sharkles]

I'm not sure. Sounds kind of weird.
People who like lots of information and depth have always existed, even before video games. It probably just comes from your personality.
In other words, the enjoyment you get from all the layers of complicated gameplay makes you more likely to be a "hardcore" gamer, not the other way around.
Anyway your theory is not testable.

 

[JohnnyW]

I'm not sure. Sounds kind of weird.
People who like lots of information and depth have always existed, even before video games. It probably just comes from your personality.
In other words, the enjoyment you get from all the layers of complicated gameplay makes you more likely to be a "hardcore" gamer, not the other way around.
Anyway your theory is not testable.

Yeah. Maybe it's just my perspective from starting games at 4 and now being 28. I'm definitely not the same person.

 

[dilettante]

Concessions to hardcore gamers aside, you can only sustain so much of the 'established' gaming market (i.e. adult gamers who have more discretionary income to spend).

Sooner or later, fresh blood has to be injected into the franchise or you'll find that the franchise base has different priorities (like children) or moved on to something else. Otherwise, there would be no incentive in the eyes of Corp's to keep churning games... (and to make more and continuous $$$$$) good games for their respective genres or attempted experiments masquerading as new games (with sometimes great results or disastrous ones)

In the interest of full disclosure, i'm pretty much new blood. I came to Civ from Civ3 and i still love Civ 3 (the horror!).

To further this discussion, here is a link that discusses this very same issue of the hardcore gamers in the video games industry.

I must warn that this is sort of OT since this doesn't relate to Civ or PC games but it does relate to the topic at hand.

I know i know it's not the same as the PC Gaming world but... there are parallels we can all draw on. (and pls bear with it... he goes on tangents and the vid is 10 min. long... i warned you on tl;dr. don't come flaming me if you don't like its length).

Take it for what it is... just a critique of video games, not gospel's truth but it is eerily similar to what we have in the pc games world.

http://www.youtube.com/user/moviebob#p/a/f/0/9joAb4XMaUs

 

[esemjay]

bloated, big-budget spectacles that are horrendous in hindsight but are hyped up enough that they make huge gobs of money.

This is exactly how I felt about "Medal of Honor: Tier 1".

1. The friendly AI was god-awful at anything except running out of bullets and pushing you out from behind cover.
2. The enemy AI was awful at NOT running out of bullets, shooting you in the face as soon as a teammate pushed you out of cover, and swarming you in every mission.
3. The story was so short, I beat the game on release day.
4. The multiplayer was an obvious knockoff of both Battlefield BC and Modern Warfare.
5. The multiplayer wasn't even CLOSE to balanced
   • The first gun you get is a semi-automatic sniper-rifle with a red-dot scope and no recoil.
   • The spawns were so awful, that if you killed someone immediately after they spawned- you wouldn't have to move for the rest of the game... they would spawn in your crosshairs.
6. The game claimed to talk to the real-deal SOF guys... then made a game that may as well be "Rambo in Afghanistan."

Seriously... that game was awful. I traded it back in the day after I got it... and I wasn't the first person. Someone actually freaked out in the store, telling the clerk that the game was SO AWFUL that "giving this bulls**t away should be illegal, let alone selling it for $60."

 

[Bad Brett]

While some of that the OP is saying is true, I believe that it can be more easily described:



Games tend to get more advanced, until the reach a certain point, and after that, the "streamlining" begins. For example:

Spoiler :

SimCity

Introduces
Power, Police, Firefighters, Stadium, Parks, Roads/Railroad, Airport/Seaport

SimCity 2000

Introduces
Water, Subway, Education, Seaports, Zone Density, Highways, Hills/Valleys, Map Generator

Removes
Nothing

SimCity 3000

Introduces
Sanitation, Neighbor Deals, Business Deals, Bus Stations

Removes
Practically nothing

SimCity 4

Introduces
Streamlined interface

Removes
Practically everything

The same thing can be said about most football management games, or the Settler games, or the Westwood games. Things become more and more complex, until they become so difficult for new players to grasp, that the need to be "streamlined".

But sadly these "streamlined games" are in many cases much simpler than the original releases. I began playing Railroad Tycoon when I was 5-6 years old, yet I had no problems understanding how the stock market worked after watching my brothers play for a few hours. Still they considered it too complex to be a part of "Railroads!".

A theory I have is that people are a lot more easily distracted now when everyone has Internet. If something seems very difficult, it's easy to take a break to check your e-mail and write something on the civfanatics forums . I've tried to introduce Civ 4 to younger people, and while they seem interested at first, they get really frustrated that there is no good step-by-step tutorial on how to play the game.

But back in the early 90's, you wanted the games to be complex as hell, so that you could stay up all night and read the manual and try to discover things that your friends didn't know about.

 

[Horizons]

SimCity 4

Introduces
Streamlined interface

Removes
Practically everything[/SPOILER]

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense on so many levels I can't take any of the rest of your post seriously. As for your diagram, is that a graphical representation of AC current?

 

[Horizons]

Hmm ... well ... would anybody say that, for example, Civ2 is a more complex and challenging game than Civ5?